


His New Italian Restaurant

by elegant_graffiti



Category: Clue (1985)
Genre: Gen, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-01
Updated: 2011-01-01
Packaged: 2017-10-27 19:59:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/299504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elegant_graffiti/pseuds/elegant_graffiti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He lost ten years of his life to prison. The world had moved on without him. He'd have to move on, too...well, a little.</p>
            </blockquote>





	His New Italian Restaurant

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kariszma83](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kariszma83/gifts).



It was good to be out.

After getting his things back – the suit he’d arrived in, his wallet, his keys – and a long bus ride back to New York City, he’d finally arrived at his apartment in lower Manhattan, not far from the United Nations. He’d paid ten years worth of rent out of his pocket, month by month, through a lawyer. For awhile there, he thought he was going to lose the place, but an elderly relative had died and left him enough of an inheritance for him to pay all the rent with money to spare.

Now, he was back at his apartment! He’d drop his next rent check off himself. He loved this apartment. It had luxurious carpeting and a bay window and views of the river from both the bedroom and the terrace.

He walked through his beloved home, a bachelor’s palace, which had been paid for but shut up quietly for nearly ten years. Inside were his things. His clean sheets! His radio! His books! He ran his hand a long one of the long oak bookshelves, which lined the wall of his bedroom, and that held his favorite texts. It was covered in dust. The books looked old, tired and neglected.

He looked around. Everything was covered in dust. Everything looked neglected. Hell, everything was. Ten or so years would do that to a place.

And so, perhaps this was the night to spend in a hotel. He’d come back tomorrow, break out the vacuum, and boogey out to some old of his old doo-wop records. He wondered if any of his neighbors were still there. The cute girl who worked at Macy’s? Or the family with the puppy and small boy? The boy must be a teenager by now.

Would his neighbors remember him? Would they recognize him after being gone so long?

He’d worry about that tomorrow. For tonight all he wanted to do was have some dinner, and sleep in a soft, warm bed that preferably wasn’t rumored to be stuffed with cockroaches.

He left his apartment, locked it again, far sooner than he would have liked, took the elevator back down to the lobby and turned south out of the building, heading towards one of his favorite restaurants in the entire city.

He hoped it was still there. He could really go for some of that old, New York Italian food. It was probably what he missed most while he was gone – the checkered table cloths, the cloth napkins, the friendly atmosphere, and the delicious tomato sauce over a plate of penne.

He turned left a few blocks down and walked three more blocks, stopping at the place he was certain his favorite restaurant was located.

Except it wasn’t there. Where once was the magic of good meatballs, there was now…a laundromat. His shoulders slumped and he sighed. Oy. If it had been a different restaurant, or a florist or…something else, that would have been fine. But a laundromat? That was depressing.

Things were different in 1965. Very different. His once immaculate apartment was dusty. His favorite restaurant was now a laundromat. People were very much into television and a band called ‘The Beatles.’ And there were some bigger things. The United States had elected a president, seen him assassinated, and seen his successor from Texas sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964. People kept talking about the Space Race, and the conflict in Vietnam, and a lot of other things that he vaguely remembered but didn’t know much about.

He would have to find some way to catch up. There wasn’t as much access to the newspapers as he would have liked in prison.

Prison. He’d spent ten years of his life in prison – the same schedule, the same meals, the same routine, day after day, month after month, year after year. All the while, the whole world around outside the prison had changed.

He was lucky he only got ten years. They all were, really. It looked far worse for them for awhile, but after more investigating, the FBI discovered that they were not the only group of people Mr. Boddy had entangled in his web of lies and blackmail and murder and whatever other federal crimes they could throw on the pile. It was such a mess that they had all been offered plea bargains.

Mr. Boddy. He’d lost ten years of his life because of that man, and “Mr. Boddy” wasn’t even his real name. Not really. But all their real names had come out.

Their real names. Their real names were irreversibly sullied.

It was an odd thing. He missed them. He hadn’t seen any of his “partners in crime” in nearly ten years, and they hadn’t been particularly close at any point, but he missed them.

He wondered if they were al l finally out too. Could he reach them? Could he find out how they had fared in prison?

As he wandered away from the spot of his former favorite restaurant, his mind wandered away from New York back to that house in New England. It was odd, how he couldn’t picture that house in the sunlight. He only pictured it at night, in the rain. In his head, it never changed.

Maybe it was because it was hard to imagine that house without a dark and stormy night because of what happened there. Maybe it was because he wasn’t a creative person. He didn’t know. But there, it was always a dark and stormy night.

This evening, in New York, when he finally found a different Italian restaurant he found appealing, it was a warm and colorful summer evening. The sky was blue and purple and pink and orange and red on the horizon. It didn’t have to be a dark and stormy night. Not forever, anyway.

The new restaurant was crowded and noisy. He watched the people through the window. They were smoking their Lucky Strikes, and they were talking, eating, and sipping wine and beer. The scents of food wafting through the opening and closing door smelled pretty good – not as good as the smells he remembered from the restaurant he went to before his time in prison, but still pretty good.

Maybe it was time for him to change too. Maybe he shouldn’t go back and find his counterparts, the way he always thought he might. Maybe they didn’t think about him the way he thought about them. Maybe they blamed him. Afterall, he was the one who failed to kill the actual Mr. Boddy.

If only he’d gotten it right. If only he knew he’d gotten it wrong! What a different outcome everything might have been.

How would he change now? His job was lost. His name was sullied. There was a bit – just a bit – of notoriety that came along with murder, if anyone looked him up. Maybe it was time to start over. Maybe they all were going to start over. He could be whoever he wanted now, do whatever he wanted, be an entirely different person.

The biggest problem that presented itself to him, right off the bat, was that he wasn’t a different person. He changed, but was fundamentally still the same. He loved Italian food, and learning, and books, and the ladies. There were some pretty ones in here. Being a doctor distinguished him, but just because he’d never practice again didn’t mean he’d ever stop being a doctor.

He approached the host. The restaurant was crowded.

“It’s a fifteen minute wait for a table, sir, may I have your name to call when a table is available?”

It came to him without even having to think about it. It was tailor-made, captured everything about him rather perfectly, and was just waiting for him to use it. Perfect.

“Professor Plum.”

You didn't have to become a new person overnight, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you liked this! I really enjoyed exploring all the little nuances of Professor Plum's pre-Clue life outside the film and how he's going to have to live post-Clue life, and I hope you enjoyed it as well. Happy Yuletide!


End file.
